Fans to decide on overkill of India-Sri Lanka contests says Kohli

Vastavam web: Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli on Wednesday left it to the fans to decide if there has been an overkill of India-Sri Lanka contests in recent years, something that had led to dwindling interest in a cicket crazy nation.India played an away Test series against islanders in 2015 followed by a short limited overs series at home in 2016 and in the current year are playing them full series across formats on home and away basis.”It definitely has to be taken into consideration because you don’t want fans going away from the game from watching the game. We have to maintain a balance of how to engage fans and keep players fresh at the same time and keep cricket exciting and keep it competitive through out the year. That point will be discussed in future definitely,” Kohli dropped enough hints as to what he felt on the issue during the pre-match conference.

“For us, there’s no room for saying that “I don’t want to play this game, or you cannot say I don’t feel like batting while standing on the crease”. There is no room for that because you will get out and the team will lose. we are at our absolute top intensity all the time.” Kohli made it clear that as cricketers they can only play an opposition that faces them but fans do have a choice to watch what they want to.”It will be better answered by the fans who watch the game if there’s too much cricket being played or repetition of same series for us it’s about playing cricket for the country and we will do what we are presented with every time a new series comes up.”

“We want to build our games in such a way that we want to look forward to playing anywhere in the world. We just want to play good cricket, that’s about it. We don’t want to wait for conditions to suit our games,” the skipper said with an obvious reference to the South African tour in January.Indian team has been on a roll for sometime now with most of the Test matches happening at home.”Right now, we have gone through a good phase where a lot of cricket has been played at home. We certainly believe a lot in ourselves as a team.”

“We want to rather develop our games for difficult conditions. If you want to be the top side in the world for a longer period of time you have to win everywhere. If we had played all this cricket away as well we would have maintained the same intensity and have the same mindset,” Kohli said.While Sri Lanka are not the best international opponent at the moment but Kohli made it clear that there is no dearth of respect for the rivals.”We feel every match we play is important. Every series is huge. It not like if we lose the series and you guys are going to say nothing to us.The skipper dropped enough hints that the inform Shikhar Dhawan and KL Rahul will retain their opening slots.